Chapter 52

There was a chance Hayan might not return to normal.

Hearing that from Cheon So-baek made No Yeon-hwa’s head spin.

She followed him in secret, observing.

Hayan no longer hid side dishes he didn’t like up his sleeve when eating at the cafeteria.

He no longer locked himself in the bathroom during training to play games on his smartwatch.

For some reason, he also stopped clomping down the halls in stilt-like shoes and waving a placard that read: “Commander Ha Yeri is the upper air you can’t breathe even in a thousand years.”

Judging by the changes alone, the weird parts were gone and he had become… cooler, by popular opinion.

He acted serious, thoughtful, and kind to everyone he met.

It was the ideal version of him—the very things No Yeon-hwa always nagged about were fixed—yet every time she looked at him, a strange anxiety stirred at the edge of her heart.

“From now on, we’ll begin the Middle Level ability test.”

“Applicants, please wait in the order you’re called. Everyone else, stay outside the barrier!”

Training Ground 1, where Middle Level promotions took place.

Even though it was a weekday—when missions were usually assigned—a lot of Special Unit members had gathered.

They had come to watch and cheer on their teammates.

In the crowd, No Yeon-hwa waited for Hayan’s turn.

A moment later, he stepped forward. The examiners checked his documents and spoke.

“Next, Agent Sae Hayan.”

“Yes.”

“Could you demonstrate one spell equivalent to Fourth-Rank White Magic here on the spot?”

“Please choose the one you’re most practiced with and most confident in.”

“Understood.”

Spells at Fourth Rank and above—the threshold for Middle Level—tended to boast high firepower and wide area.

To prevent accidents, the examiners included external personnel who could handle magic—mages from the Towers and guilds, and former Special Unit members.

Hayan inhaled and drew up mana, and the transparent barrier rippled.

As the formula spread across the floor, a mage from the Firepower Support Unit, who had been watching another station, recognized what he was doing.

“That’s Channel.”

“That is?”

“Yeah. Most people master what their own Tower teaches them fastest, so this is unexpected.”

“Wasn’t Channel a First-Rank spell?”

To the friend in an inspector’s coat, the mage in a blue robe shook his head.

“There’s Multi-Band Channel for large-scale battles. Remember during the Sea of Decay—how units without assigned mages could still communicate?”

“Now that you mention it, yeah.”

“You only think about cutting down whatever’s in front of you, don’t you? Anyway, that worked because Tower mages laid that spell across the whole area like a net.”

“Huh. Then it’s lamer than I thought.”

Reactions were lukewarm for a supposed Fourth-Rank showing, just as he said.

The barrier kept shivering, but from the outside nothing seemed to change, and Hayan merely stood in place. In a way, that was natural.

Only a few mages nodded, having analyzed the structure and roughly counted how many channels were active.

They tossed around obnoxious jargon about noise floors and how neatly the interactive feedback loop was built, talking only among themselves.

“Still, that’s unusual. Middle Level mages don’t usually main Multi-Band Channel.”

“Why not?”

“Easy to learn, brutally inefficient to master. The more people there are, the mana cost skyrockets. Why have a high-value mage maintain that in every fight? Just stick a relay on a siege turret and automate it—or dump it on grad students, way easier.”

“…”

Channel was a poster child for magitech-assisted spells; almost nobody bothered developing it further after reaching Middle Level.

Even so, it still qualified as Fourth Rank, so it met the pass criteria.

The examiners ticked a few boxes and began evaluating Hayan’s magic.

They were too far to hear, but No Yeon-hwa had worked with Word-Spirit since childhood; she could follow the gist by reading lips.

“Multi-Band Channel… any reason you chose to present this as your main?”

“Because it’s the most useful spell in the present situation.”

“You’re with Division 3, right? True, the Frontline Breakthrough Unit doesn’t have mages who can maintain Multi-Band Channel, so it might be a good choice.”

“Deployment time and the structure of your formula are both excellent.”

So far, so good.

If he had been his usual self, he might have done something odd and gotten dinged for it.

If Hayan stayed like this—as Cheon So-baek suggested—the Special Unit might even prefer it.

Just when the evaluation seemed about to end quietly, something changed.

“You pass. But we recommend learning other spells as well.”

“Agreed. Channel can be replaced with other techniques. As you said yourself, it may not be the most useful spell in the current situation.”

“Do you truly think so?”

“…Pardon?”

He had turned to leave, but stopped at a single remark from an examiner.

The formula at his feet still maintained Multi-Band Channel.

At a flick of his hand, the spell expanded, climbing the walls of the safety barrier.

So many channels activated that—even though the spell had no physical force—the barrier shuddered like the eye of a storm.

And finally…

—Bzzzzzt!

『I asked if you truly thought that was all.』

The barrier ripped apart, and through the Channel, Hayan’s voice rang out to everyone.

Not only to those gathered in Training Ground 1.

Posts shot up on the Special Unit Bamboo Forest board asking what the hell was happening inside the Bureau building.

Even emergency alerts came in: citizens nearby were reporting strange disturbances through their smartwatches.

“My apologies. I’m still inexperienced and failed to control the output properly.”

“…….”

“Then, I’ll take my leave.”

Hayan glanced once at the examiners clutching their ears, bowed, and walked out of the training ground.

It was only a moment, but the emotion in his eyes was clear—disappointment.

No Yeon-hwa hesitated, torn between chasing him or not, when the massive man seated in front stood up.

He picked up his broken glasses from the floor. It was none other than Hayan’s roommate—the Butcher of Bishkek.

“Hm? You’re…”

“You know me?”

“Aren’t you the Word-Spirit user who once inflicted an unforgettable wound on my heart? When I joyfully invited you to a snack party at the lab, only for you to brush me off with excuses about some trivial classified mission?”

The uselessly long introduction.

No doubt Hayan had been talking about her like that when he was with Alexei.

She wanted to correct his ridiculous phrasing right away, but the urgent matter was figuring out Hayan’s state.

She asked Alexei if he had noticed anything strange about his roommate in recent days.

“Hayan was always a little strange.”

“I know that already. Just tell me whatever comes to mind.”

“The other day he skipped training. He told me he had a great idea while sitting in the bathroom. When I asked what, he said he closed every toilet lid and arranged toilet paper on top in the shape of a question mark. Something about a social experiment on ‘quantum superposition.’ I have no idea what that meant.”

“……”

That was way more than she wanted to hear.

For a second she almost decided, for the sake of every employee’s mental health in the Bureau, maybe it was better to just leave him be.

His antics before the Word-Spirit didn’t matter now.

She tried to move quickly and catch up to him, but froze at Alexei’s next words.

“But compared to what he said last night, that was completely normal.”

“What happened yesterday?”

“He said he was quitting the Special Unit.”

“What…!?”

No Yeon-hwa’s heart lurched into her stomach. She pressed him for details.

Alexei pulled a psychology book from his back pocket and pointed at a page.

“Hayan’s mind is currently unstable. Due to some form of mental interference, he can suppress emotions and reach rational conclusions purely from the information given.”

“How is that unstable?”

“Because even if humanity pursues rationality, emotion is always the basis of individual choice.”

“……”

“In a nation with a birth rate of 0.03, unlikely to last two or three generations more, is it really worth investing resources in non-Awakened citizens the way we do now?”

“Cut the academic crap. Explain it so even a kid would get it.”

Sitting down, she used Word-Spirit, and the giant—far smarter than he looked—snapped his book shut.

“It means Hayan believes that if demons are to be wiped out from this land, he’ll have to adopt even more extreme methods than now.”

“…….”

“And whether everyone will agree with that… remains uncertain.”

“Well, I sure don’t.”

Whatever it was, she had made up her mind.

No matter the means, she would bring Hayan back to normal.

No Yeon-hwa popped a throat candy into her mouth, grabbed her trusty megaphone, and added another tool to her kit before heading in the direction Hayan had gone.

Then she doubled back, pointing at the book Alexei had been reading.

“Why the hell are you reading this crap?”

“This? I was studying in preparation for the promotion exam…”

“Psychology isn’t on the test, dumbass. Birds of a feather really do flock together—you two are just as bad as each other.”

Finding Hayan wasn’t hard.

The Special Unit Bamboo Forest’s flood of anonymous posts pointed straight to where he was heading.

Narrowing the search down to the first-floor lobby, No Yeon-hwa asked around at the café until she learned he had taken the elevator underground.

The same place where she had used Word-Spirit on him.

The interrogation room was cold and dark.

The guards lay unconscious on the floor, sprawled as if struck down by something unseen.

“Stay down.”

She gave them a short command as they stirred, then walked inside.

There she found the door to Perez’s cell standing open.

He was supposed to have been urgently transferred after the Tower of Proof was abruptly suspended, handed over under a secret deal with the Yellow Tower.

Did Hayan have business with him?

“I see. So they promised to grant you magical enlightenment in exchange for bringing the Outer God’s blood.”

“Can you tell me who they are? Ah, an Awakened speaking in a Chinese dialect…”

“It’s true the Philosopher’s Stone can resurrect more than just ‘humans.’ This makes the next Council session all the more exciting.”

Hayan’s voice echoed from inside.

For a moment, No Yeon-hwa considered waking the guards and calling for reinforcements.

But no—this was her responsibility. She had changed him with her Word-Spirit, and so it was on her to set him right again.

At last, she stepped forward and faced him.

Hayan, just finishing with Perez’s interrogation, turned toward the doorway as if he had known she would come.

“As expected, you came.”

“Hayan…”

“Please, have a seat. Ah, but there’s nowhere left to sit here. Shall we move to the next room?”

“Why are you like this? What’s your goal?”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk about.”

Since her awakening, there had been only two people No Yeon-hwa had faced and immediately known she could never defeat: Ikseon, and Division 1’s Commander.

But now—every one of her senses screamed the same thing.

“Yeon-hwa. Won’t you join me in changing this world?”

The shadows writhing behind Hayan radiated a pressure on par with them.